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But in what mode are these secondaries, and
Intellectual-Principle itself, within the First? They are not in
the Filling Principle; they are not in the filled since before
that moment it did not contain them.
Giving need not comport possessing; in this order we are to think
of a giver as a greater and of a gift as a lower; this is the
meaning of origin among real Beings. First there must be an
actualized thing; its laters must be potentially their own
priors; a first must transcend its derivatives; the giver
transcends the given, as a superior. If therefore there is a
prior to actuality, that prior transcends Activity and so
transcends Life. Our sphere containing life, there is a Giver of
Life, a principle of greater good, of greater worth than Life;
this possessed Life and had no need to look for it to any giver
in possession of Life's variety.
But the Life was a vestige of that Primal not a life lived by it;
Life, then, as it looked towards That was undetermined; having
looked it had determination though That had none. Life looks to
unity and is determined by it, taking bound, limit, form. But
this form is in the shaped, the shaper had none; the limit was
not external as something drawn about a magnitude; the limit was
that of the multiplicity of the Life There, limitless itself as
radiated from its great Prior; the Life itself was not that of
some determined being, or it would be no more than the life of an
individual. Yet it is defined; it must then have been defined as
the Life of a unity including multiplicity; certainly too each
item of the multiplicity is determined, determined as multiple by
the multiplicity of Life but as a unity by the fact of limit.
As what, then, is its unity determined?
As Intellectual-Principle: determined Life is
Intellectual-Principle. And the multiplicity?
As the multiplicity of Intellectual-Principles: all its
multiplicity resolves itself into Intellectual-Principles- on the
one hand the collective Principle, on the other the particular
Principles.
But does this collective Intellectual-Principle include each of
the particular Principles as identical with itself?
No: it would be thus the container of only the one thing; since
there are many Intellectual-Principles within the collective,
there must be differentiation.
Once more, how does the particular Intellect come to this
differentiation?
It takes its characteristic difference by becoming entirely a
unity within the collective whose totality could not be identical
with any particular.
Thus the Life in the Supreme was the collectivity of power; the
vision taking place There was the potentiality of all;
Intellectual-Principle, thus arising, is manifested as this
universe of Being. It stands over the Beings not as itself
requiring base but that it may serve as base to the Form of the
Firsts, the Formless Form. And it takes position towards the
soul, becoming a light to the soul as itself finds its light in
the First; whenever Intellectual-Principle becomes the
determinant of soul it shapes it into Reasoning Soul, by
communicating a trace of what itself has come to possess.
Thus Intellectual-Principle is a vestige of the Supreme; but
since the vestige is a Form going out into extension, into
plurality, that Prior, as the source of Form, must be itself
without shape and Form: if the Prior were a Form, the
Intellectual-Principle itself could be only a Reason-Principle.
It was necessary that The First be utterly without multiplicity,
for otherwise it must be again referred to a prior.
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